Time for the Semaine des Langues

The Semaine des langues has become a fixture in French schools and this year is celebrating its 10th edition already. It will start on St Patrick's Day, 17 March, and run through to 22 March. This year’s theme is « Des langues pour créer, innover et s’engager ! » There are lots of events planned around the country. 

The Académie of Orléans-Tours organises several competitions, such as a polyglot creative writing competition and a polyglot dictation, which is for teams of 3e or lycée students studying different languages. Each group only takes the dictation of the part in the language they are studying. Here's an example of a dictation for an English-German-Spanish group from last year.

Each year, the Académie de Nice  organises a plurilingual competition, Histoires communes. The finalists for this year's competition are already available to view. Some really went for the plurilingual angle, like the Collège Villeneuve in Fréjus, which used French, Arabic, English, Spanish, RUssian, Moldavian, Georgian, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, Kurdish, Chechen, Ukrainian, Thai and Iranian. Like the Lycée Bristol in Cannes, they took the theme of the U.N. conference on the oceans being held in Nice in June 2025. One part of the project was a game called Marine Masters created by 6e pupils.
This project by 5e pupils from Collège André Cabasse (Roquebrune sur Argens) used Canva to create a virtual pop-art museum.

The Académie de Poitiers has different challenges to encourage playing with language such as transparent words and words that have travelled between languages as well as games around the sounds of languages.